As if anybody really expected anything different. After growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years, the Microsoft Azure platform saw its growth rate dip a bit.
Meaning, the company’s cloud business is, once again, growing at a slower rate.
The technology titan shared its numbers for the first quarter of fiscal year 2020 on Wednesday, and reported earnings showed revenue growth in its Azure division slow down to 59%, down from 64% from the previous quarter.
In fact, those of you keeping tabs, this growth rate has largely been declining since the third quarter of the company’s 2018 fiscal year.
Since Redmond does not disclose Azure revenue in dollar amounts, it is not exactly easy to get an idea of how the business is growing. But this much is known that its growth rate has been declining as it expands. Same is the case for cloud leader Amazon Web Services, which has also seen slower growth.
Law of averages, and all that.
Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes Azure, was the company’s biggest segment by revenue in the final quarter of 2019. But during the past three months, it dropped behind both the productivity and business processes unit and the personal computing segment.
But the important thing is that overall, Microsoft easily beat expectations for its first fiscal quarter that ended September 30.
As for whether its cloud arm leaps ahead in the next quarter and gets back to winning ways, well, that remains to be seen.
